


sideral (blue like ghosts, pink like violets)

by the merienes tranch (lilhalphys)



Series: how rare and beautiful [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Kallura Appreciation Day, Trans Female Character, Trans Keith (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 06:35:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13265742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilhalphys/pseuds/the%20merienes%20tranch
Summary: def: emanating from the stars and especially from stars held to be maleficEvery morning, without fail, Allura forgets.A companion to supernal





	sideral (blue like ghosts, pink like violets)

**Author's Note:**

> these are not stand alones! to get the full picture, it is critical that you read both, at least in my opinion.

Every morning, without fail, Allura forgets.

 

Truthfully, it is the only time she wishes to remember. Nothing is worse than the bitter sadness that comes with the moment of clarity, reminding her that her people are gone and that calling for her father would be fruitless.

The only difference is that it isn’t morning this time. The universal clock reads a time she at one point in her life would be horrified to be awake at. She isn’t proud of it now, and it feels like disobeying her father when she resigns herself to wakefulness for the night.

The Castle halls are empty, and far too quiet, sprawling, endless tunnels once inhabited by busy little mice that have long since moved on to something she can only hope is better. Truthfully, Allura cannot remember a time when there was not at least a bit of noise in the halls, even when she snuck around in the wee hours of the morning - the gentle laughter of a group of friends enjoying an Altean film late into the night, the shouts and crashes of someone beginning their daily training extra early, the muffled bustle of her father’s work as she tiptoes past his door - 

But it's just so. Quiet. The Paladins are all at least pretending to be dutifully asleep, and there’s no one to laugh, to train, or to catch and scold her for being up so far past her bedtime before lovingly tucking her back in with a doting kiss to the forehead. 

She’s gotten all too used to being able to dispel this morning loneliness with her training, so the night suffocates her and forces her to confront the ghosts skipping around vacancies in her history like an old, rotting distress signal.

Her feet take her to her father’s favorite observation deck. They’re passing by clusters of beautiful nebulae, so she shouldn’t be surprised that the room is occupied. Keith stands, looking off at something beyond the infinite space, her arms signaturely crossed over her chest. 

For so long, Keith has left her clutching at heartstrings and shirt hems with something foreign to her, something she doesn’t understand but that has always perfectly distracted her. Her eyes catch on a planet glowing with life, and she thinks of Altea, and

“Shiro says you have beautiful skies on Earth.”

___

_ She wishes she had more pictures of him than the one of him in his uniform.  _

_ She shouldn’t care, of course. He lied to her, lied about getting her an ice cream when she graduated, about making sure she didn’t do anything stupid on her twenty-first birthday, about coming home at all, for that matter. But she hated the uniform more than she hated him, because it was the uniform that took him away. _

_ She spends most nights on the couch anymore; she’s always too exhausted from exploring the energy that brought her here to stay up and sit on her roof watching the stars.  _

_ Her eyes unconsciously glance out the window, and she gasps. The sky is on fire like she’s never seen in her life. For a moment, she is afraid that she’s been caught in her little hideout, that she’s dying, but her flight instinct sends her forward, running across the sand, chasing the embers licking the sky. Chasing something beyond them, until she falls upon her knees and weeps. _

___

“Oh, Keith, that’s...so,” Allura’s hand reaches out, desperate to reach across this manufactured distance, and she almost touches Keith’s shoulder before -

She flinches away. Allura tries to stop the guilt, the pity from showing on her face. Keith coughs. “Now...tell me about Altea”

Her reaction to that must have been worse from the way Keith sputters. “I, I mean, only if you want to-”

“I think I need to.”

“Allura-”

“It’s fine.”

She takes a deep breath in. “On Altea, we had more than one sun we were close enough to to see. It made our winters short, and our sunrises and sunsets were not as beautiful as yours, I believe. But there was,” she swallows, and again, trying to hold back the tears pushing from behind her eyes like a persistent child, begging her father to take her down to the valley to pick flowers, “a certain phenomenon, where our two suns would appear to be close to each other, and the light, it was so...magical. Like, like a flower blooming in the sky. Father said it would hurt my eyes to stare, but it was so beautiful, I knew,” she turns to Keith and is met with the damp awe in her eyes, “I knew it would be worth it.”

Keith reaches towards her, and Allura does not move away as she drags her finger across her wet cheeks, collecting the old tears and stopping new ones.

For a moment, she melts. But no longer. Keith’s hand never moves farther than her shoulder, and only when the child behind her eyes starts coming up empty handed.

___

Later, alone again in artificial darkness, Allura wonders if she said too little to ever change anything. She decides her bed is too big.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you!


End file.
